Steam Android App Hints At More Than Games

The recently released Steam app for Android devices suggests that Valve might be thinking about distributing more than just games through its flagship digital portal.

The app includes a number of categories under the “genre” heading that are decidedly un-game-like. These include things such as “accounting” and “photo editing,” which suggests that Valve might be thinking about other kinds of software it can distribute through Steam. In total, there are 10 categories that don’t appear on Steam’s web portal that are available in the Android app.

Using Steam to sell other kinds of software doesn’t seem too far-fetched, either: Steam has become the premier way to purchase and download software on the Internet, and if Valve is looking for new ways to expand the business, offering alternative types of software would be a pretty easy to way to do it.

Valve recently released the Source Filmmaker software it used to make the “Meet the Pyro” Team Fortress 2 video, a free bit of software created in-house for use with Valve’s Source game engine. While it interacts with video games, Source Filmmaker isn’t a game, and that seems to lend a little credence to the ability of Steam to help distribute other types of software.

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